The piñata cake

For a Mexican themed party it would be silly to having anything less than piñata style cake. For this cake you will need:

Stage 1

Firstly bake two Victoria sponge cakes. Cut these in half so that you now have four halves.I baked mine a few days before construction as the finished cake will have a lot of moisture I wanted the sponges to have dried out a little

Stage 2

Measure the diameter of the cakes. Mine is 21cm and therefore I deduced that I should make a hole in the middle of the cake that measures about 11cm. I worked this out by measuring five centimetres away from the sides of the cake as although I wanted to create a large hole in the middle in which to fill with sweets I still want the cake to remain stable and not fall to pieces. If however the cake does split (like mine) don't worry as there will be lots of jam and cream to patch it up.

Using a compass draw a circle and cut it out.  You can now use this as a template  to cut out the middle of the second and third halves. If like me you can't find a compass try using a round object with a similar diameter to the hole you want to cut out.

Place all the sweets in a bowl and give them a good mix. I am doing this because I want to sweets to be randomised when I place them in the cake instead of having distinct layers of skittles, haribo and maoam.

Whip the cream and now the real construction starts.

Place the first layer on the cake stand and spread liberally with jam and cream before layering the first holey layer on top. Continue this process but only spread jam and cream on the cake leaving a hole in the middle.

Once the third layer is in place add 3/4 of the sweets. You want to make sure that the swets are not only evenly spread but also fill every nook and cranny as when the cake is cut the sweets will come bursting out.

The final layer of cake (without a hole) acts as a kind of lid encasing all the sweets inside. Spread the top with more jam and cream et voila stage 2 is complete. 

Stage 3

Make the butter icing. I am adding red food colouring to mine as I want it to be slightly pink. Cover the cake in icing including the sides as well as the top and decorate with the remainder of the sweets. My sister and her best friened  joined me in this as they clearly do not trust my decorating skills.

The marsh and the mallow

Over my past few blog posts I have been investigating the world of experimental ‘healthy’ baking such as substituting traditional ingredients or using superfoods like chia seeds. Now however for something totally different as I set out to make vanilla marshmallows. For this recipe you will need:

250g sugar

400g water

1 sachet of gelatine or 4 gelatine leaves

A few drops of vanilla extract/essence (or food essence of your choice)

3 egg whites

Icing sugar for dusting

Edible gold glitter (optional)

Lightly grease a baking tray with sunflower oil or equivalent non-flavoursome fat and dust with icing sugar. 

Place your sachet of gelatine (or leaves) in 150g of water and leave to dissolve or soften in the case of the leaves.

Meanwhile add the rest of the water and sugar in a thick based saucepan and boil to 121°c (the threading stage) this will take approximately 8-10 minutes. I have used brown sugar for mine hence why it looks so dark.

it's so swirly and pretty

 Take off the heat and combine the gelatine stirring continuously. 

Whisk egg whites until soft peaks form.

Whilst still whisking pour in the sugar/gelatine syrup down the side of the bowl (this took to many hands to do so I was not able to include any pictures). This is the stage where you should add any food essence and/or food colouring. As I have used brown sugar my marshmallow mixture has a light caramel tint and it is for that reason that I chose to add a bit of vanilla. Transfer to your greased tray and dust with more icing sugar

and for an added dash of pizazz a light sprinkling of glitter.

 Leave to set in the fridge for 4 hours or overnight.

Don't you just love it when things go wrong?  It would appear that the syrup component of this mixture has somehow separated itself from the fluffy egg white so upon turning out the tray I was left with two different layers. Quite literally: marsh and mallow.

So yeah that looks quite hideous and gross, it tastes nice though. Upon reflection I  would halve the amount of syrup made. 125g of sugar and water. I'm not sure what I'm going to with this not quite marshmallow stuff that's in my fridge. Oh dear this is like the time when I tried to make gummy bears 

Update: I seperated the sugary syrup layer from the mallow...or maybe it was the marsh...and used it in a milkshake.

The gummy fail

I stumbled across a recipe for homemade gummy bears and I if I were to say that this didn’t tickle my pickle I would lying (eww guys that’s gross). The recipe that I (tried) to follow can be seen here: http://undressedskeleton.tumblr.com/post/42764785751

I tried to follow the recipe but I had no lime juice or orange juice or mangosteen juice or stevia on the raw or even most of the fruits that were used. So I improvised….recipes are for wimps anyway. Famous last words

Hence the use of guava juice, apricots and even a little bit of grenadine and the new flavours of gummy bears were born: Apricot, Orange and Banana and Very Berry. 

Another a really large, gaping problem was that I did not have a bear moulds,  a bear shaped cutter  or even any cutter small enough so even this had to be improvised upon. I did however have a selection of farmyard animal moulds so the ‘bears’ now turned into gummy animals of some description (and hearts). 

Although the gummy things will turn out rather larger than what I been hoping for, they are going to be more like jelly babies than gummy bears. Oh well, In the words of Beyonce: ‘ I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly. 

Alas what I had been hoping for did not happen as when I put the  gummy in the moulds it did not come out.

When heavily greased the shapes did come out but.... this one was supposed to be a duck

Basically the only thing I have been able to achieve this morning is a big ball of goo. It's like Flubber except for the fact that it doesn't bounce or dance or even play the maracas 

After a lot of patience and a whole lot more trial and error I was finally able to create at least some gummy things out of the apricot, orange and banana batch (although I realised soon after it had set that this flavour was not all that pleasant)

It did however require me to grease each little mould before using it every single time. I also learnt that moulds with anything fiddly were a no no so little lambs, bunnies, chicks and anything else vaguely Easter related were out of the question. Gummy blobs are therefore the dish of the day.

The very berry gummy/jelly has still not set (4 hours later) this is probably due to the fact that this batch has a lot more liquid in the mixture than the last one, although I did boil this batch for longer. So I will just have to sit tight and wait to be able to fail all over again. In the meantime I'm making raspberry shortbread.